Read Online The Barefoot Queen by Ildefonso Falcones - Free Book Online Page A

asked anyone for her water yet? She had heard him talk but she couldn’t understand a word of the exchange about the donkey. The gypsies were speaking in their tongue.
    “Melchor!” shouted a woman who was nursing a baby, both breasts bared. “There’s a black, black Negress following you. Christ, is she black! I hope my milk doesn’t sour.”
    “She’s thirsty,” was all the gypsy answered.
    A couple of huts further on, warned of his arrival, a group of men was waiting for him.
    “Brother,” Melchor greeted a younger man as they grabbed each other by the forearm.
    An almost naked little boy had run over to grab his two-pointed staff, which he was already flaunting to the other kids.
    “Melchor!” The gypsy returned his greeting, squeezing his forearms.
    Caridad, feeling herself about to faint, watched how the man she had followed greeted the gypsy men and women and tousled the hair of the children who came over to him. What about her water? A woman noticed her.
    “And that Negress?” she inquired.
    “She wants to drink.”
    At that moment Caridad’s knees gave in and she collapsed. The gypsies turned and looked at her, kneeling in the mud.
    Old María, the woman who had asked about Caridad, snorted.
    “It looks like she needs something more than a drink, Nephew.”
    “Well, she only asked me for water.”
    Caridad tried to keep her vision focused on the group of gypsies; her sight had clouded over; she couldn’t understand what they were saying.
    “I can’t lift her,” said Old María. “Girls!” she shouted toward the youngest ones. “Give me a hand picking up this Negress and getting her inside!”
    As soon as the women surrounded Caridad, the men washed their hands of the problem.
    “A bit of wine, Uncle?” a young man offered Melchor.
    Melchor put an arm over the gypsy’s shoulders and hugged him. “The last time I drank your wine …” he commented as they headed to the next hut. “The salt and vinegar they used to treat our wounds in the galleys went down easier than that brew!”
    “Well, the donkeys like it just fine.”
    They entered the hut amid peals of laughter. They had to bend down to get through the doorway. It was a single room that was used for everything: the bedroom for the young man’s family, kitchen and dining room; there were no windows and just a simple hole in the roof for a chimney. Melchor sat down at a chipped table. The older men sat in other seats or benches and the rest stood; more than a dozen gypsies filled the space.
    “Are you calling me a donkey?” Melchor picked up the thread of the conversation when his nephew passed a few cups around the table. The invitation was only for the older men.
    “You, Uncle, are a winged steed at the very least. The other day, in the Alcalá market,” continued the gypsy as he poured the wine, “I managed to sell that gray donkey you saw last time you visited, remember? The one that was in such terrible shape.” Melchor nodded with a smile. “Well, I gave it a bottle of wine and you should have seen how the poor beast ran—looked like a purebred colt!”
    “You’re the one who must have been running out of that market as fast as you could,” interjected Uncle Juan, seated at the table.
    “Like a bat out of hell, Uncle,” admitted the nephew, “but with somegood money, which I won’t be giving back, not even to the devil, no matter how fast he makes me run.”
    Melchor lifted his glass of wine and, after the others had joined him in his toast, drank it down in one gulp.
    “Watch out!” said a voice from the door. “We wouldn’t want Uncle Melchor to run off like a colt.”
    “We could sell him for some good money!” replied another.
    Melchor laughed and gestured to his nephew to serve him up some more wine.
    After a couple of rounds, more jokes and comments, only the older men remained: Melchor, his brother Tomás, Uncle Juan, Uncle Basilio and Uncle Mateo, all bearing the last name Vega, all dark-skinned,